Hollywood within the polder

Slowly, the bus driver navigates the passengers through the neighbourhood Tussen de Vaarten. The tour, led by the artists Yeb Wiersma and Vanessa Hudig, is part of a project that they have realised by commission of the Municipality of Almere and Museum De Paviljoens. Earlier, they had invited the people of the neighbourhood to pose in their own surroundings. Their day-to-day dealings were captured on video: a boy is lying around while making a phone call, a girl is looking out the window, two women are seated at the coffee table – they are the small-scale stories of neighbourhood residents who, for a brief moment, have become actors. Through the artists' intervention their house has briefly turned into a set and the residents of Tussen de Vaarten have become extras in a fictional film. This gives the day-to-day dealings the character of a Hollywood movie.

Leporello
These stories, which hover somewhere between fact and fiction, come together in a leporello; a booklet of postcards that show video stills of those portrayed. A CD of the song Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen carries the public along in the story about the neighbourhood. Hudig composed the soundtrack especially for Tussen de Vaarten. In the background, pupils of public primary school "Het Palet" in Tussen de Vaarten sing along.

For SITUATIES / Tussen de Vaarten, the artists take their inspiration from Fires, a book by Raymond Carver who is known for, amongst other things, writing the script for American director Robert Altman's film Short Cuts. In his short stories, Carver poignantly portrays the residents of American suburbs. He imbues seemingly insignificant, minor events with hope and meaning. Wiersma and Hudig do something similar in Tussen de Vaarten: they visualise small-scale stories and encourage people to be open to the unexpected: Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen.

Greeting cards
In this way, just as was the case in previous projects, both Wiersma and Hudig toy with the boundaries between a private situation and the public space. The locals are portrayed in an ordinary (intimate) environment – and their image can be sent the world over. At the same time they are invited to view their neighbourhood, their living space, through the eyes of a tourist outsider. In doing so, the artists unsettle the boundaries between the private and the public. That what is public gets a personal meaning; the private space becomes public domain. This reversal will briefly alter people's mindsets and give them a different outlook on their living environment. Confronting experiences that at first glance seem to be opposed – the public and the private – is a theme that recurs in the artists' individual projects. In 2000 and 2001, for example, Wiersma installed a telephone in a Rotterdam underground station. Instead of hearing a dial tone, anyone who picked up the phone got to hear a question posed by a movie character. In this context, the film fragment acquired another meaning. In a different Rotterdam underground station, Hudig put up billboard-sized portraits. From the wastebaskets next to the billboards, a conversation between two Rotterdam citizens resounded. Precisely in a place were people usually pass each other anonymously, Hudig's intervention encapsulated and confronted people with personal portraits of strangers.

Museum De Paviljoens acquired Wiersma's series Departure for De Collectie Almere. It consists of photographs of people who are sleeping in New York's Cooper Union Library, where the interplay between the private and the public is given a poetic connotation.

SITUATIES / Tussen de Vaarten is one of the projects realised by Museum De Paviljoens since 1998 wherein the identity of the residents and/or the location within the city take centre stage. “Floating above this urban setting, Vanessa Hudig sings the praise, à la Aimee Mann, of the lives behind the façades […] ‘He notices her staring / at spilled milk on the floor / running of white rivers’. And each couplet is followed by that imploring-liberating punch line: ‘Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen’.”

1 Both artworks form part of the project Underground Sensations, 10 temporary artworks in the Rotterdam Underground, 2000/2001.
2 E. Dijksterhuis, “Soundtrack van een Almeerse woonwijk” (Soundtrack of an Almere neighbourhood), NRC Handelsblad, 19 May 2004.

Vanessa Hudig & Yeb Wiersma, Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen
Vanessa Hudig (1969, Rotterdam, NL) objects, sound
Yeb Wiersma (1973, Groningen) photo
SITUATIES / Tussen de Vaarten / ‘Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen’
November 2003 - February 2004